One Day After DeVos Calls Jim Crow “Choice,” Trump Moves HBCU Assistance from USED to WH | deutsch29

One Day After DeVos Calls Jim Crow “Choice,” Trump Moves HBCU Assistance from USED to WH

During her January 17, 2017, Senate confirmation hearing, Betsy DeVos said that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) should be left up to the states and then admit that the “confused” the fact that IDEA is a federal law.

I watched in disbelief at her publicly displayed ignorance of an education law that is part of Teacher Training 101.

Such a moment clearly illustrates that DeVos has lived her life in a Michigan-billionaire, Dutch Reformed Church bubble, effectively divorced from even basic knowledge of a public school system that she is now in charge of on a federal level.

Add to that her well-established ideological drive for school choice, particularly vouchers, but also charter school expansion. Moreover, since her position is ideologically driven, DeVos has both directly and indirectly financed school choice without being touched by the fact that both charter schools and vouchers are fraught with problems, including failing to consistently outperform the traditional public schools to which they are supposed to be superior.

When she flubbed IDEA, I didn’t think DeVos could do worse.

I take it back.

On Monday, February 27, 2017, DeVos issued a statement in which she attempted to spin the Jim Crow origins of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) into a “pioneer[ing] of school choice.”